Which astronaut who got the short end of the stick in the Mercury 7 bunch? Imagine going through a grueling selection process from a pool of 508 test pilots, surviving two years of hardcore astronaut training, only to get yanked from your launch pad dreams due to a heart murmur just two months before your flight. Seriously? Talk about a cosmic bummer.
But that’s what happened to Donald “Deke” Slayton. And did he pack his bags and leave in a huff? Nope. Instead, he settled into the ultimate “management” role as Chief of the Astronaut Office and later Director of Flight Crew Operations, basically becoming the babysitter for the hotshot astronauts. Fast forward to 1970, and NASA finally decided Deke was good to go. In 1975, he got his moment in the stars, docking an Apollo spacecraft with a Russian Soyuz capsule. Took long enough, but hey, better late than never, right?
